Notes




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Faster-than-light observations and experiments

Image
There are situations in which it may seem that matter, energy, or information travels at speeds greater than  c , but they do not. For example, as is discussed in the propagation of light in a medium section below, many wave velocities can exceed  c . For example, the phase velocity of X-rays through most glasses can routinely exceed c , but phase velocity does not determine the velocity at which waves convey information. If a laser beam is swept quickly across a distant object, the spot of light can move faster than  c , although the initial movement of the spot is delayed because of the time it takes light to get to the distant object at the speed  c . However, the only physical entities that are moving are the laser and its emitted light, which travels at the speed  c from the laser to the various positions of the spot. Similarly, a shadow projected onto a distant object can be made to move faster than  c , after a delay in time. In neither case does any matter, energy, or informat...
Read more

Numerical value, notation, and units

Image
The speed of light in vacuum is usually denoted by a lowercase c , for "constant" or the Latin celeritas (meaning "swiftness, celerity"). In 1856, Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Rudolf Kohlrausch had used c for a different constant that was later shown to equal √ 2 times the speed of light in vacuum. Historically, the symbol V was used as an alternative symbol for the speed of light, introduced by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. In 1894, Paul Drude redefined c with its modern meaning. Einstein used V in his original German-language papers on special relativity in 1905, but in 1907 he switched to c , which by then had become the standard symbol for the speed of light. Sometimes c is used for the speed of waves in any material medium, and c 0 for the speed of light in vacuum. This subscripted notation, which is endorsed in official SI literature, has the same form as other related constants: namely, μ 0 for the vacuum permeability or magnetic constant, ε 0 for the v...
Read more

Propagation of light

Image
In classical physics, light is described as a type of electromagnetic wave. The classical behaviour of the electromagnetic field is described by Maxwell's equations, which predict that the speed  c with which electromagnetic waves (such as light) propagate in vacuum is related to the distributed capacitance and inductance of vacuum, otherwise respectively known as the electric constant ε 0 and the magnetic constant μ 0 , by the equation c = 1 ε 0 μ 0   . {\displaystyle c={\frac {1}{\sqrt {\varepsilon _{0}\mu _{0}}}}\ .} In modern quantum physics, the electromagnetic field is described by the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). In this theory, light is described by the fundamental excitations (or quanta) of the electromagnetic field, called photons. In QED, photons are massless particles and thus, according to special relativity, they travel at the speed of light in vacuum. Extensions of QED in which the photon has a mass have been considered. In...
Read more